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It wasn’t cutesy like they often were, but rather fit the aesthetic that she’d always had—regal and powerful. It made me feel like a little kid again, the way I often felt around other people. It always felt a bit like everyone else around me had their shit together, were full-fledged adults and I was still rushing around, shoes untied, tripping over my own feet.
I turned page after page, seeing Nem grow up before my eyes. How had I never seen this before? Her precocious smile, the mischief she always seemed to be in. “It’s weird seeing her like this,” I admitted.
“What do you mean?” Hayden asked.
“I don’t remember a lot about her before she disappeared, so I mostly know her as she is now.Nowshe doesn’t smile like this, doesn’t look so happy or free.”
Because she came back for me.
A hand on my back made me raise my head to find Tor staring at me, concern in his golden eyes.
I forced a smile and turned another page. “Sorry, it’s just that it’s hard to see her like that. It makes it more obvious how much she’s changed, how much she went through—for me.” I shook my head, flipping pages until we moved forward to a picture of my mother heavily pregnant again.
“She looks so happy.” I dragged my fingers over the plastic that covered the entire page.
“Aren’t most mothers-to-be happy?” Char asked. “For some reason, women seem to like their offspring.”
“She never seemed all that happy as a mom,” I admitted. “She was always busy, always doing what was required of ‘a woman of her position,’ as she’d say to me. I don’t know that she ever really wanted kids so much as it was expected of her.”
“Even if she wasn’t the warmest, I’m sure she loved you,” Hayden said. “I mean, you can see it in her face right there, you can see it in every picture where she looks at your sister.”
I didn’t know if I believed him, but his words still warmed me. I flipped through pictures of me as a baby, surprised to find how normal I looked.
I didn’t seem like some ‘Mafia princess,’ in them. Instead, I appeared like any normal child, crying or laughing or making a mess. I wished I could remember those times, because they seemed so average that I wanted to know how that felt.
“The Quad?” Hayden asked when a picture of Nem, the Quad and I together appeared.
I smiled at the familiar expressions of the men and nodded. “It figures only Dane is smiling. He’s always smiling, even when he really shouldn’t be.”
“They adore you, don’t they?”
“I guess.” I tapped the photo. “They were the only solid thing in my life for a long time, the only thing I could rely on. I know how the rest of the world sees them, but I see them differently because Iknowthem. There’s no one I would trust more. They would stay up late with me when I was sick or take me to my doctors’ appointments or come to the parent-teacher conferences. They were a bigger part of my childhood than either of my parents ever were.”
I took a deep breath, then whispered the next part after I turned the page to find a single image without all the fancy styling. It showed me in a black dress, my arms wrapped around Rune’s neck as he held me in a graveyard. “This was the funeral of my mother and my sister.”
“Where’s your father?”
“He was there, shaking hands and greeting others. At the time, I thought it was just the way things were done. You never were supposed to let others see your weakness, so it didn’t seem strange to me that he could do that. Of course, I didn’t realize at the time that he’d been the one to kill them.”
Just like that, the air in the room thinned to the point that I struggled to draw it in.
Char spoke, his voice softer than I expected, making me suspect he was trying hard to sound almost gentle. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
“You don’t understand. Do you know why it happened? Because the Quad went with me to a specialist appointment. I had a lot of doctor appointments, and instead of having them there to protect my mom and my sister, they went with me. It gave my father a chance to attack them, a chance he wouldn’t have gotten if they hadn’t been with me.” I forced myself to say the last part. “It’s my fault it happened.”
“It isn’t your fault,” Hayden said and set his hand on top of mine. It took his touch for me to realize I’d curled my fingers in, gripping the corner of the unadorned page to the point that it wrinkled. His warmth let me ease those fingers before I damaged anything. He kept speaking. “It wasn’t a child’s fault because their father decided to kill two people. Your father made that choice, and the blame is his—not yours.”
The words felt like cool water on a burn. I’d never dared to utter that truth before, that I felt responsible for it all, that I’d carried that burden for so many years.
I’d trodden the water of my life, with that weight always pushing me down, forcing me to suck water into my lungs, because I couldn’t let it go, couldn’t put it down. I didn’t know if I believed him, but justhearingthe words helped so much.
A droplet of water struck the plastic that sat over the photo, and I had no idea what it was from at first. Tor cupped my cheek, then wiped away another drop.Oh, I’m crying.
I blinked to clear them away, then smiled, the expression perhaps not entirely real but easier than before.
Tor sighed and grabbed his phone, typing a message so quickly that he could impress a teenager. When he finished, he turned the screen toward me.
You don’t have to pretend to be okay.
